Common Abbreviations

A Guide to Editorial Sigla

All Latin and Greek texts, even those inscribed on stone, began as handwritten copies (often damaged) of lost authorial originals and so contain errors, interpolations, and omissions. Editors use the surviving copies to recreate the original by choosing the variant readings likeliest to be correct and emending doubtful readings by conjecture. Loeb editors use sigla within the text and in notes beneath the text (usually in Latin, by convention) to flag variants and conjectures that significantly affect its translation or interpretation. The following list explains the sigla most frequently encountered; readers interested in more detail should consult the particular editor’s review of the history of the text in the work's introduction.

In continuous text

[ ] or { }

words that the editor considers spurious. If the latter is used, the former encloses additional information such as references to other texts